Re: External projects using gnome for translation?

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

sön 2004-04-04 klockan 18.25 skrev Todd Berman:
> 	I am the maintainer of MonoDevelop http://www.monodevelop.com which is
> a IDE (not just for mono, the name is a bit misleading). I have spent
> the last little bit converting our i18n to use gettext. I am wondering
> if it is possible to commit a pot file somewhere on gnome's cvs (which I
> have write access to already), and get translations done that way.
> 
> 	Although MonoDevelop is not hosted on the gnome cvs server, it is
> absolutely and 100% designed to be a gnome application (We have some
> ungnomey parts, but we are working on it).
> 
> 	Please CC me on any replies, as I am not on this list, and thank you
> very much for any replies, and all the wonderful work you people have
> done for translating gnome. :)

We used to host pot and po files for external projects in the GNOME cvs
server for this purpose in the past, but we don't do that anymore.

The reason is that it was rather a rule rather than an exception that
the synchronization with upstream got messy and unattended after a
while, and in both directions. Maintainers upstream forgot to send new
pot files, and translators forgot to send their translations in GNOME
cvs also upstream in addition to committing them to cvs.
The result of all this mess was a lot of wasted and obsolete work from
translators, and suboptimal translations upstream, so we decided to stop
with this and only do translations for software actually hosted in GNOME
cvs.

Also, there is a "cousin" translation project to the GNOME Translation
Project (GTP) that is simply called the Translation Project (TP). The TP
has a much better procedure for handling external projects (in fact it
*only* does "external" projects), so it seemed silly to compete with the
TP in this respect. And in the end, many translators in the GTP also
translate in the TP, so there should be no concern over translation
quality.


So what I think you should do is to first and foremost decide on where
you want to be hosted. If that is the GNOME cvs, then you can use the
GNOME Translation Project as soon as you've moved. Being in GNOME cvs
also has other advantages if you'd like to consider your application
GNOME software, as you can then more easily benefit from the
contributions of other GNOME developers.

If you'd rather still be hosted where you currently are, then the TP is
most certainly most suitable for you. You can read more about how to
register with the TP at the TP homepage on the TP homepage
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/ and on
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/HTML/maintainers.html
specifically.

I can also recommend reading
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/tutorials/gnome-i18n/developer.html#tp
which basically outlines what I've already said about the GTP and TP,
but that document also contains other useful stuff to know as a
maintainer about translation and strings.


Christian